To be able to exploit the advantages of cloud computing technologies, it is very important to choose the right cloud hosting provider. While you will find many cloud services providers in the market, not all are reliable or trustworthy. You should perform a background check on them and test their services for a trial period to be sure you made the right choice. Before signing up with any cloud provider, it is absolutely essential to review their Service Level Agreements.

You can get an idea of how to choose the right vendor by following these suggestions:

1. To start with, you need to first evaluate your business requirements to see whether you actually need cloud hosting or not. Very often, businesses can manage well with shared hosting plans and there is no real need to spend a fortune on cloud hosting. When your business is expanding fast and you are experience high traffic peaks from time to time, you may need more scalability in your hosting plans. That is the time when you should consider a cloud hosting provider.

2. Before signing up with any provider for cloud hosting solutions, it is necessary to do a background check on its track record and financial status. If the provider is not found to be stable financially and does not enjoy a large customer base, it would be unwise to sign up with such a cloud hosting provider. Moreover, the vision of this provider should be in sync with your company vision and business goals. Their track records should show positive buyer ratings, superior technical support and after-sales service. Since technical issues are bound to crop up from time to time, regardless of how reliable the vendor is, you need a provider which can resolve the problems without delay.

3. Finding out about the level of customer support you can expect to get from a provider is important when you sign up for cloud hosting. Ideally, the hosting provider should be available 24x7 through chats, phone calls and emails. You must also check their response times to make sure that downtimes are minimized and issues are resolved without any delay. The support should not only be round-the-clock but also layered and you need to verify the response times for the different support tiers.

4. When choosing a cloud hosting services, it is also important to check its security measures. Since security is crucial because mission-critical data is going to be stored in the cloud, it is vital that the data is well-protected against all kinds of possible breaches. So, you need to inquire about their security techniques, certifications, data encryption methods, biometric authentication, end-point security controls, on-site surveillance etc. Common security measures will include firewalls, anti-virus detection, virus removal, routine audits etc.

5. The greatest advantage of choosing a cloud is to benefit from cost-savings. With cloud computing, your capital and operational expenses are dramatically reduced because you neither have to buy hardware for data storage, nor do you have to monitor and secure the servers. You will find that most vendors stick to a pay-as-you-go model where you pay only for the resources you use. Your provider should offer prices which align with your business budgets. You must also be wary of any upfront payments and prices for additional services that you may request for.

6. Before signing up with any provider, it is important to know about their data center locations. These should not be at too great a distance from the staff. Else, you will have to bear huge transport costs to send the staff for repairs to the data center facility. Moreover, these should not be built in areas which are highly prone to disasters like earthquakes.

7. Finally, the provider must be in a position to retrieve important data that may have got deleted or lost accidentally. You can check their SLAs for backup provisions and data recovery methods. These will also offer you an insight into their redundancy measures for mitigating data loss risks. It is important that the provider gives you scalable plans so that you can get additional resources to handle more traffic.

Using these easy tips, you should be able to identify a quality cloud hosting provider without much difficulty.